Jorma Elo wakes up at Boston Ballet

Jeffrey Cirio takes flight in Awake Only.

Perhaps Boston Ballet's intriguing "Fall Program" (through this weekend at the Opera House) is title-free because the marketing department has finally run out of catchphrases they can work around the word "Elo."

As in "Jorma Elo."  For the evening is essentially a showcase for Awake Only, a fresh dance by the Ballet's resident choreographer, whom we've been watching develop for the past seven years (yes, it has been that long).  The piece has little connection to the other works on the program - Christopher Bruce's Rooster, set to hits by the Rolling Stones, and William Forsythe's The Second Detail.  So the evening is a bit of an omnibus affair.  But each dance is a worthy one (or, in the case of Rooster, at least a fun, popular one), and Awake Only - in my opinion - is particularly interesting in that it marks another breakthrough for Elo.  So the fact that the evening is untitled shouldn't give you the idea that its' unimportant - much less unrewarding.

Now as I've written before - I've considered Elo at length - this choreographer has long been obsessed with the problem of integrating street moves and dance pop into the rigors of ballet.  In fact in "The Elo Experience," from last year, dancers Jeffrey Cirio and Larissa Ponomarenko (who together had begun to seem like muses for this choreographer) were even dressed as a club boy and a damaged ballerina, wandering the landscape of clubland.

Larissa has since moved on, of course, but Cirio remains one of the company's leading young lights, and Awake Only seems to signal that Elo's identification with this talented dancer is, if anything, becoming more intense.  But having gone solo, as it were, the choreographer seems to also have turned inward, and produced a dance unlike any we've seen so far from him - one in which he has begun to tiptoe toward true autobiography, and the kind of structured narratives you might expect from Balanchine.

Which is good news, as you could feel Elo cycling and re-cycling much the same material in his last few efforts.  But everything feels different about Awake Only, from the opening moment in which a charmingly self-possessed little boy in pajamas (the adorable Liam Lurker) raises the curtain with a magical gesture, to the blushes of dawn with which John Cuff's lighting often washes the stage, to the obvious autobiographical material that informs the dance itself. As I whispered to my partner, Dorothy - I don't think we're in clubland anymore!


And honestly, I was glad to leave behind the night club (and the cinema, another Elo obsession), and breath a little fresher choreographic air. Not that Elo is entirely free of pop convention here - that little boy "wakes up" a seemingly aged Cirio in Spielbergian style; still, he kicks off what amounts to a poignant and honest engagement with the choreographer's own road to adulthood, set (somewhat surprisingly) to testaments of faith by Bach.

Mom and Dad (a very fine Lia Cirio and Sabi Varga) are on the scene - as paragons of modern ballet, it seems, though their moves are still inflected by Elo's signature quirks and swivels.  And then there's "The Dance" itself - a bevy of ballerinas, in a conceit straight out of Balanchine - from whose ranks emerges Cirio's love interest, a surprisingly tender Kathleen Breen Combes.  What comes next struck me as structurally hazy at times, I admit - but their couplings clearly represented a coming-of-age for Cirio (who lost his shirt after one) and were studded with passionate duets, as well as moments of eloquent stillness.  The dance wraps with an intriguing glimpse of what we assume is "the future" - closing with an intensely poignant gesture that I'll always remember: Combes embraces Cirio's head - his mind - at the last moment, only to have him slip from her grasp to the floor; Elo has in effect choreographed his own death.  Needless to say, seeing Jeffrey Cirio suddenly stilled, after what amounted to a tour de force of constant, quicksilver motion (above), was in and of itself quite devastating.

Alas, the opening number on the program, a reprise of Christopher Bruce's Rooster, boasted little of this mature depth, although its various struts (set to the Rolling Stones) are undeniably fun, and offer a good showcase for the company's young soloists and hard-working members of the corps.  Here the women cut the strongest profile - dressed mostly in black and red, as cheerleaders for Hell's Angels, I suppose. Rachel Cossar again impressed with her intelligent presence in "Lady Jane," while ripe, rollicking Brittany Summer came off as the closest thing to a "Stones girl" currently at the Ballet.  Diana Albrecht and Ashley Ellis also caught my eye - although Bruce's star turn went to the elegant Whitney Jensen, who made a memorable "Ruby Tuesday."  The men had their moments, too - Robert Kretz was a credible cock-of-the-walk, John Lam dazzled as always, and young Irlan Silva made the most of "Paint it Black."

The always-commanding John Lam.

Still, in the end the trouble with Rooster is that it sells the Stones short - Bruce can't really conjure their own awareness of the destructive power they themselves were unleashing; his vision of "Sympathy for the Devil," for instance, is simply a wilder-than-ever good time (rather than a riot-with-murders, as occurred at Altamont).  Tellingly, the finale is simply a repeat of steps from the numbers that have come before; there's not even an attempt at build or summation.  Oh well, as a showcase it's fun, and I suppose it pulls a few musically illiterate boomers into the Ballet.  But beyond that, it's a wash.

The "Program" closed with a return to The Second Detail, a seminal work by William Forsythe, who has been a great influence on Elo and the Ballet's style in general.  I believe we've seen this mysterious piece twice before, yet its cool, strange extravagance - it's part collective rehearsal, part funeral for modernism, part self-referential art-object (there's a title card reading "The" on stage throughout) - has lost little of its weird appeal.  Under clinical overhead light, and set to Thom Willems' thundering, meandering score, it's all abrupt shifts - from explosive combinations to precision corps work - which cycle back to extreme, stretched solos, which themselves suddenly collapse into shrugs and slouches.  And the Ballet seemed to dance it more confidently than ever.

In fact they danced the hell out of it, with edgy, intense displays from Isaac Akiba, Paulo Arrais, and John Lam (at left); there was also off-hand virtuosity on hand from Kathleen Breen Combes, Bo Busby, Jeffrey Cirio, and Whitney Jensen - whose persona was almost made for this stuff.  The piece closes with its most perplexing gambit - an Isadora-Duncan-style diva, done up in Robert Wilson drag, staggers through the collective, briefly organizes it, then suddenly expires. The great Lorna Feijóo once again brought off this strange solo with confident aplomb.  She must know what it means; maybe someday she'll tell me.

Elo in retrospect

Jeffrey Cirio and Larissa Ponomarenko in "The Elo Experience." Photos - Gene Schiavone.

I'm late with thoughts on Boston Ballet's "Elo Experience" (it closes this weekend), and Hub Review fans know that means only one thing: I haven't made up my mind about it. But it's time to give my mixed feelings their best shot.

Those unfamiliar with the high cultural scene might be surprised to learn that for the last few years our city has been home base for one of the hottest choreographers in the country: Jorma Elo, childhood friend (and fellow Finn) of Boston Ballet's artistic director, Mikko Nissinen. Elo was named the company's resident choreographer some six years ago, and since then has created a new work for the Ballet just about every year (including Plan to B, Brake the Eyes, and In on Blue, perhaps my favorite of his ballets, as well as re-interpretations of Carmen and Rite of Spring).  In between his Boston gigs, Elo has also set dances on many (if not most) of the A-list companies in America and Europe; his name and work are now everywhere.

So an Elo retrospective is certainly in order.  Rather than give us another in-depth look at his ballets, however, Boston Ballet has settled on a pastiche of the choreographer's greatest hits (coupled with a loose set of connecting dances), and pitched this as a world premiere, "The Elo Experience," which - as pastiches often do - had both its pluses and minuses artistically.

On the plus side, it allowed Elo to declare himself quite plainly, which is something I'm sure artists often long to do.  From the beginning, it seemed pretty clear to me that this choreographer was obsessed with forging some kind of relationship between ballet and pop culture, and in the connective "break" dances he has concocted here for Lisa Ponomarenko and Jeffrey Cirio, he comes right out and says the same thing himself.   At the very top of the show, in fact, he proffers an improbable romance between a club-boy and a ballerina: young Cirio, in sparkling club gear, enters as a kind of surrogate for the choreographer, pushing along a house-sized trailer that looks like an idealized computer equipped with a giant screen; out of it pops Ponomarenko, in a dark, slightly damaged tutu.  Something like a partnership immediately commences between them.

Every one of those details counts, I think, in what Elo is trying to say.  That giant computer screen operates in the same way the moon and the drooping trees do in Swan Lake: it's shorthand for the emotional setting, the cultural surround, of the work.  Only the pathetic fallacy is passé, Elo tells us; ballet now has to operate against the cool, minimalist chic of the i-Pad.   Of course his boy-meets-girl scenario assures us that in at least one way, he isn't really changing anything about ballet.  And as usual, his central duo are from different worlds - only not the peasants and the gentry, or the supernatural and the sublime, as we might expect in Giselle.  No, this time one is from the world of ballet itself: damaged, experienced but uncertain, yet hanging onto some kind of glamour and romantic ideal - while the other is from club-land, innocently into sensory overload and the multi-tasking of pleasure, not to mention Ecstasy, Ritalin, and who knows what else.

The crash between these two sensibilities is Elo's basic statement.  And if that sounds a bit simplistic, rest assured that Elo is a font of dazzling variations on this central trope, which has more resonance than you might at first expect.  The choreographer rarely concentrates on the climactic pas de deux, for instance, because today's lovers don't pledge their troth, they hook up instead; so in Elo we're always watching a kind of communal sex roundelay that never really resolves into individual statements.   These people aren't interested in achieving an apotheosis; instead, they're dedicated to optimizing their experiences.  Indeed, when something like a pas de deux coalesces, there's rarely a plausible love connection in it - the dancers often don't even touch, in fact, but instead carve out complementary musical spaces around each other before exiting in some sort of dazzling lift.  And when a girl leaps into her partner's arms in Elo, we understand the jump exists as a thrill in and of itself rather than as the culmination of an emotional commitment.

Dancers Lia Cirio and James Whiteside. 

If this sounds a bit cold, well - it is (but then so are your kids); at any rate, it seems to reflect the way we live now.  At least Elo is free of the drained sense of sado-masochism that often pervades the work of William Forsythe (with whom he is often compared); this choreographer clearly just wants to have fun.  And he's not free of nostalgia for the way things used to be; in In on Blue, for instance, he heaves a palpable sigh for the loss of romantic connection (it's set largely to Bernard Herrmann's mournful score for Vertigo, btw).  At any rate, if Elo's oeuvre is usually served slightly chilled, it's nevertheless almost always exciting, and there were plenty of thrills in "The Elo Experience" (even its name kind of conjures a thrill ride, doesn't it).

Although I have to say I always wanted a bit more of the individual rides, and less of the rather repetitive connective pit-stops.  Even the already-brief Plan to B (which first put Elo on the map, I'd say) seemed slightly abbreviated here, although it's just as dazzling as ever, and probably is the best argument for the real grace that undergirds his occasional freneticism.  There were similar chunks of gorgeous, if hyperactive, music visualization in the excerpts from dances choreographed elsewhere, like Double Evil (set to a blaring, but lyrical, Philip Glass concerto for timpani), and Lost on SLOW; but often in these dances you felt you'd only just gotten a handle on things (as in the mysterious Lost by Last, set to more Hermann, this time from Psycho!) when Elo cut back to his frame story (or the ongoing parody of its accompaniment, Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, in which a huge corps hurtled pointlessly through a quick variation or two before dashing offstage).

I should also add, I'm afraid, that the corps in these sequences was hardly a model of precision; things often got a bit sloppy, in fact.  The excerpts themselves fared far better - here the company consistently bowled you over, though always in flashes.  Still, Sabi Varga,  John Lam, Kathleen Breen Combes, Joseph Gatti, Lia Cirio, James Whiteside and Lasha Khozashvili all had their moments of brilliance under Elo's choreographic strobe, and for the first time I thought newcomers Paulo Arrais and Rachel Cossar made positive impressions.  And Cirio and Ponomarenko consistently charmed in their bickering "break" dances.

But the lack of star turns only points up another basic problem with an evening's worth of Elo: the very cultural conditions he illuminates - our short attention spans and craving for distraction - tend to prevent his works from developing or building.  Long or short, most of his dances achieve the same effect, over and over.  Not that he's unaware of this issue himself; in the ongoing dialogue of non sequiturs in his frame story,  the ballerina kept sighing to her club consort that "We always end up in the same place."  And indeed they did.  Perhaps now that he's had his retrospective, Elo may decide to set out for somewhere new.

Fire dance

The female tribe of Rite of Spring. Photo by Rosalie O'Connor.

It's been a stunning season for Boston Ballet, with a growing sense that the company has pulled off what amounts to a stylistic trifecta. First came the flashy postmodernism of Black and White, then the sparkling modernism of Balanchine's Jewels, and then the sumptuous nineteenth-century Sleeping Beauty. And for last weekend's season finale, the company planned yet another artistic coup: a recreation of the signature pieces of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, followed by a leap-frog beyond post-modernism and into whatever comes next with a brand-new Rite of Spring.

Five years ago, this kind of season was only a dream; now, it's a reality. Nearly. But so nearly that there's cause for celebration anyway. For the first half of the Ballets Russes program was generally smashing - only one piece, "Le Spectre de la Rose," wobbled on its stem - and if the new finale, from Jorma Elo, was slightly frustrating in its narrative control, it was still dazzling in its showmanship and formal attack. And the dancers (some of whom had already performed punishing roles earlier in the evening) picked up this choreographer's gauntlet of intense micro-movement and ran with it all the way to a standing ovation.

But first, the living-diorama first half, devoted to the seminal works of the Ballets Russes, which up-ended ballet and jump-started modernism a century ago with pieces like Balanchine's Prodigal Son and Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun. Here the Ballet opted for as close to a literal transcription of the original performances as they could manage - we got Bakst's original costumes and backdrop for Faun, for instance - and the results were generally splendid.

Indeed, it was absolutely wonderful to see Balanchine's inventive Prodigal Son again (the company did it maybe six years ago), because this strange but potent ballet never seems to grow old, and it once again held the audience spellbound. I saw both Yury Yanowsky and Jared Redick (who is retiring to run one of the Ballet's academies) essay the title role. Yanowsky, who also played the part six years ago, was the eager libertine, Redick more the naïve idealist. Both delivered complex portrayals, however - indeed, I'm not sure either have ever danced better; although perhaps Yanowsky had the edge in the pathos of the Son's desperate return, literally on bended knee (his slow crawl up his father's totem-like torso was unforgettable).

There was the lingering sense that the piece wasn't quite as powerful as it could have been, however, due to the casting of the Siren who brings the Son down (and then shakes him down). Melanie Atkins (who is also retiring from the company) is a wonderful Balanchine dancer in either his classic or music-hall modes, but the rigid savagery of Prodigal Son isn't really in her comfort zone, and she doesn't have too much sexual chemistry with Yanowsky (both above left). Hers was an intriguingly self-aware Siren, but not a galvanic one. Kathleen Breen Combes, who danced against Redick, had more of the right kind of calculating force, and was coldly compelling, though her pairing with Redick again didn't send off precisely the right sparks - Combes against Yanowsky would have been the ideal, but I'm not sure they ever got to dance with each other.

Next up was "Le Spectre de la Rose," Fokine's distillation of romantic yearning: a young girl falls asleep while contemplating the eponymous blossom, which then takes masculine form in her dreams. Unusually for the Ballets Russes, it's a charmer, and it charmed here, although Nelson Madrigal, who certainly has the sensual presence to play the ghostly posy, was a little blurry technically on opening night (he had been stronger when I saw him rehearsal). Madrigal sharpened up, however, once he was partnering the exquisite Cornejo, who was pretty much perfect for (if under-utilized in) this classic role.



Then came another tour de force - Nijinsky's ode to the sexual animal, Afternoon of a Faun, in which Roman Rykine took the role made famous by the great danseur, with Lorna Feijóo as his nervous temptress (both above, photo by Eric Antoniou). The "diorama" aspect of the evening came into clearest focus here, because the piece itself is designed as a kind of pagan frieze, with classical figures marching on and off in languid profile, and the Faun (tail, horns, and all) descending from a block of phallic rock. The effect was of living, breathing panels sliding back and forth before us, and the stiff stylization resonated nicely with the Faun's darting and, well, fawn-like movements. The self-serious scandalousness of the piece could collapse into camp with a single wrong move, but Rykine was mesmerizingly intense in his preternatural alertness (even his slow sniff of his prey came off as somehow sexy), and Lorna Feijóo was so committed to her own frightened temptation that the whole decadent daydream came off beautifully.


At last came the greatest challenge of the evening: to top, or at least equal, these classics with a new Rite of Spring - and maybe even spark a kind of riot in the theatre as the original did (reconstructed by the Joffrey Ballet, below).



I know, I know - hard to believe the odd hopping seen above could have kicked off such a fuss, let alone the modern era. I guess you had to be there (and it's no wonder the Ballet commissioned a new version!). At any rate, Jorma Elo brought to the famously savage score something far more sophisticated than Nijinsky did, and hardly so easily interpreted. He traded the primitive costumes for shiny red slacks and what looked like bathing suits, and cast the dance against fire, not earth (tiny jets of actual flame flickered continuously throughout). The resulting imagery seemed to flout the intents of the original in a key respect - it had left Flora and Pomona and the gods of the harvest far behind, and was playing itself out in some glamorous virtual space; yet it was still lit by the old fires, with a kind of "community" operating within its dark parameters. There were also still tribes in evidence - two of them in fact, men and women, with a subtle power struggle going on between them - but no sages or elders were demanding a sacrifice, as in the original; the community itself simply seemed to be hoping for one, perhaps even desperate for one to give it some sense of meaning, some connection to the old narratives. Thus despite the transfiguration of the work's "program," its goal seemed roughly the same.

Only it was in the communication of that program that Elo came up short - as he often does. Because intriguingly, rather than simplify Nijinsky's original script, the choreographer seemed to have complicated it. The sacrificial lamb, or "Chosen One" of the original (Larissa Ponomarenko) had a girlfriend this time around (Melissa Hough) - as well as what seemed to be a true love (Sabi Varga). And her girlfriend seemed to have a boyfriend, too. And while there were no sages or patriarchs running the show, there seemed to be a kind of tempter (Yury Yanowsky), who often threatened, abused, or perhaps even drugged Ponomarenko, with the strangely distant assistance of his own gal pal (Lorna Feijóo).



Got all that? Well, I think the audience had a little trouble with it (certainly the Globe and Herald critics did!), as these relationships and intrigues were layered into a constantly morphing set of variations, as well as sudden, swooping choral movements (above, photo by Eric Antoniou). And Elo did us few favors with the choreographic syntax he had devised minute-by-minute. By now, local audiences are used to his vocabulary: the "breaks" and swivels and pops, the windmilling arms, the ingenious lifts and leaps and combinations that seem to go on forever. His choreographic language is dazzling on its own terms; the trouble is that it's too self-involved formally. It hints at symbol and pantomime, but always seems to draw back into some level of "difficulty," some vague inscrutability, some slight post-modern distance from both obvious meaning and its own musical accompaniment (Elo likes to run on just past the end of the score, and often self-consciously dodges its climaxes). Like his Rite of Spring, Elo seems to have lifted off from the choreographic earth, and is sending semaphore back from some private cybernetic sphere.

But Balanchine's Prodigal Son, seen earlier in the evening, made a punishing contrast to all this. Balanchine's choreography was endlessly inventive, and incorporated everything from slapstick to gymnastics, and yet its meaning was always transparently clear; perhaps even more strikingly, Balanchine was able to thread symbol, narrative and formal experimentation together in a stunning synthesis. But to Elo, this easy flexibility between multiple valences and modes seems impossible; because his busy formal concerns are so determinant, he has to drop them entirely for a few moments to give us a little bit of drama or clear-cut symbol. Thus Rite of Spring sometimes felt like a road-map spiked by sudden sign-posts stuck in swaths of impenetrable territory.

Okay, so Elo isn't Balanchine; who is? And if the design of Rite of Spring wasn't always interpretible, it was nevertheless often beautiful: Elo has designed a mysteriously balanced trio for Feijóo, Yanowsky and Ponomarenko, for example, that's as good as anything he's done, and the choral work was consistently breath-taking. Plus he has hidden a surprise in his finale, which I suppose it's ruining no secrets at this point to give away - and which teases us with a new perspective on everything that has come before. In the last moments, the "Chosen One" fights back, and kills her tempter; he becomes the sacrifice. Or was he always intended to be the sacrifice? Has the entire dance been one of Ponomarenko's hesitation before her big assignment? Or has it been a bit more like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," in which hard-to-interpret intrigues have slowly determined who, exactly, is going to get the axe? It would have been wonderful to have been able to look back over the choreography and discover hints and clues to support the dance's final twist. And maybe someday, Jorma Elo will be able to pull off that kind of programmatic structure. But not yet.

The Forsythe Saga

When the curtain rose last weekend on Boston Ballet's Next Generation program (which I enthused about briefly below), the company no doubt thought that with a daring program of premieres, dominated by women choreographers no less, they had some right to expect a little praise from the dance press.



They couldn't have been more wrong.



Well, perhaps that's a bit unfair. The Globe's Karen Campbell (once her review finally appeared) did write that the evening's risks "paid off nicely, not just for the art form, but for audiences as well." But alas, she then rated the program precisely backwards, giving the highest marks to the charming chamber piece by Sabrina Matthews, and the lowest grade to the big, thrilling new works from Jorma Elo and Helen Pickett.



But at least she was generally supportive, in the Globe's patented "now-don't-hurt-anybody's-feelings!" way. Not so the Phoenix's erudite-yet-dismissive Jeffrey Gantz, who labeled the program "overconceptualized and underchoreographed." "I wanted more individuality and more interaction," Gantz groused, complaining the evening was "more about human bodies than individual dancers."



The coup de grâce, however, came from the near-pan by Alastair Macaulay of the Times, who perhaps hit the nail on its critical head when he wrote: "My problem at Boston Ballet is with (the) house style." And whose style might that be? In a word: William Forsythe's: "I have seen too little of Mr. Elo’s work to generalize, but he cites William Forsythe as one of the 'master choreographers' with whom he worked closely as a dancer (as does Ms. Pickett, a dancer with Mr. Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt for more than 10 years). And all five dances were lighted by Mr. Stanley to appear School of Forsythe . . . a Forsythean tone dominated most of these works."



Macaulay's right about that much - Mikko Nissinen, Artistic Director of the Boston Ballet, has definitely bought into Forsythe as the Next Big Thing, and chosen fellow Finn Jorma Elo as our leading exponent of Forsythiness. It would be nice, yes, if the Ballet would be more upfront about this focus - Next Generation was hardly a smorgasbord of different points of view, and the odd little opening folly, Téssera, in which the four choreographers performed in a schema devised by Elo, ended up emphasizing their similarities rather than their differences.

But is Macaulay also right about Forsythiness in general? I don't think so. A good primer on Forsythe, perhaps, is the excerpt from the seminal In the middle, somewhat elevated, posted above - set to a spooky techno score, the duet is only a small part of a long meditation on incorporating street and break moves into the technical language of ballet. Like much of Forsythe, the results are exhilarating, but cold - like a rush of arctic air - and somehow resistant to the kind of development we expect of serious dance. There's a sexual anonymity, even a commodification, to Forsythe, I think, as well as a persistent undertow of nihilism - as I once wrote, in between bursts of choreographic invention, the choreographer seems to be "just hanging around, waiting for the Viagra to kick in."



But at the same time, Forsythe grips you, at least initially, with his virtuosity, and his formal pursuit of a kind of "freestyle ballet" remains an exciting goal. More to the point, somehow the "School of Forsythe" at Boston Ballet seems to be transcending its master's limits. Jorma Elo, for instance, taps into a kind of exquisite poignance when he meets ballet halfway, as it where, and his latest, In on Blue (at left), was, I thought, perhaps even more haunting than his premiere from last year, Brake the Eyes. That piece, as many may recall, sent prima ballerina Larissa Ponomarenko wandering through a post-industrial shadowland pierced by throbbing, low-pitched sonar. This time, Elo conjured a gorgeous fairyland ballet and set it underwater (or at any rate in a kind of aquarium filled with intensely blue light). This submarine Midsummer Night's Dream soon disintegrated into strange, awkward duets for the men and women (the ballerinas carried on, legs "swimming," with the men sometimes crawling after), which in turn were menaced by surging "clouds" of dancers who invaded the stage with waves of rippling chaos. The work was obviously a kind of elegy for ballet itself - it was set largely to Bernard Herrmann's score to Vertigo (i.e., a love theme for the dead) - and its mournful romance was almost palpable. This piece, like Brake the Eyes, deserves a wider audience - the question for Elo is whether he can bring as much emotional resonance to looking forward as he does to gazing backward.







There was no question, however, that Helen Pickett had opened her own department in the School of Forsythe with Eventide, a big, broad, brilliant work (with the fiercely sinuous John Lam, above) that marked a huge step up from the accomplished Etesian. This time around, Pickett conjured a kind of globalized divertissement backed by an Indian-inspired (that's dot, not feather) soundtrack from Michael Nyman, Jan Garbarek and Philip Glass. The results played like Tchaikovsky-gone-Bollywood, or something the Sleeping Beauty might have watched before marrying Merce Cunningham in Bangalore. The results were also, I might add, dazzling; Pickett's control of space and scale were superb, and her variations simultaneously highly formal, lightly erotic, and slightly bemused. True, the piece awkwardly changed gears, and lost a bit of focus, in its duet-heavy middle section, but nevertheless regathered its energy for a truly stunning finale before a glittering chunk of Abstract Expressionism (neatly pulling one more avant-garde strand into the mix). My final impression was of a dance smartly poised between a dozen or more influences, schools and ideas, with a sense of the history behind each.



This sense of larger formal purpose is, I think, what distinguishes Boston Ballet today. The lesser pieces on the program - Gone Again, from Heather Myers, and ein von viel (that's "one of many") from Sabrina Matthews - were only "lesser" in their intellectual, not choreographic, depth; they were beautifully crafted, and perhaps even more "human," as Macaulay felt, than the pieces by Pickett and Elo, but they lacked the sense of formal exploration that "the School of Forsythe" all but stands for. True, in said school the dancer is subsumed by the dance - but isn't that often the case in formal explorations? (And Next Generation did, I should note, feature star turns from John Lam, Lorna Feijóo, Larissa Ponomarenko, Sabi Varga, Jared Redick, James Whiteside, and Yury Yanowsky.) And isn't ballet actually too often personality-driven (with some critics in this town all but fantasizing about their favorite dancers in print)? To me, the fact that the "next generation" should be given over to ideas rather than stars seems nothing to be blue about.

A night to remember

As the curtain rose on Jorma Elo’s new dance for Boston Ballet, Brake the Eyes (at left), everyone was holding their breath: would it mark a rebound from the failure of last year’s Carmen, or instead ratify the common impression that Plan to B had been a fabulous fluke?

Well, you couldn’t quite hear it, but within minutes the entire audience had let out a collective sigh of relief: Brake the Eyes was going to be fine, even superb. To be honest, it’s not quite a masterpiece – particularly when set next to Christopher Wheeldon’s Polyphonia – and Elo hasn’t so much developed as dodged his weak spots (narrative, cumulative depth); but Brake the Eyes is thrilling in so many ways that it’s mean-spirited to carp. Instead, we should give thanks that he’s found ways to extend, if not advance, his idiom – and then sing hosannas for the rest of the program, which is perhaps the best thing Boston Ballet has done in years; indeed, possibly the finest evening of dance seen in these parts since the debut of Mark Morris’s L’Allegro some dozen years ago.

Perhaps in reaction to the raspberries for Carmen, this time out, Elo has turned reflective. Setting his choreography to a mix of Mozart and a droning soundscape by his girlfriend (I know, it sounds like trouble, but don’t worry) – the choreographer conjures an intriguing meditation on his current plight, and perhaps the cultural plight of ballet itself: Larissa Ponomarenko, Boston Ballet’s leading Russian-old-school avatar, wanders about the darkened stage in a damaged, discombobulated state, chirping Russian phrases to herself, and responding to the industrial throbs around her with quirky, bird-like bits of proto-choreography. Then, suddenly, it’s lights up, and rushes of headlong, amplified Mozart, with Ponomarenko enveloped in a technically brilliant corps that all but dashes through Elo’s trademark mix of swiveling combinations, spinning leaps, and shoulder-popping lifts. As in Plan to B, we can just sense a hurtling harmony, a kind of off-center balance, in all the morphing movement; this may be ballet by MTV (a friend has dubbed the style “x-treme ballet”), but it’s still alive with grace and joy; Elo hasn’t succumbed to the dead S&M chic that animates the dances of, say, William Forsythe, where everybody seems to hanging around, waiting for the Viagra to kick in. And while I don’t feel the dance develops much, its energy is intoxicating (in the rapid runs of the Mozart, Elo justifies his own choreographic speed), and bits of hope seem to glint through Ponomarenko’s disoriented returns; a little laugh occasionally ripples through her, and her movements began to echo those of the larger ensemble: perhaps, Elo is saying, there is a way for ballet to not only respond to the high-tech culture at large, but even master it.



There is, however, no doubt of the mastery of Polyphonia (Larissa Ponomarenko and Boyko Dossev, above; photos by Gene Schiavone) – Christopher Wheeldon is by now the anointed heir to Balanchine, and Polyphonia has already been elevated to the pantheon of greatness by none other than the New York Times. The good news is that it belongs there – even if Wheeldon is a bit backward-looking, while Elo is definitely inching forward. This ten-dance investigation of piano works by György Ligeti begins conventionally enough, but steadily bores deeper and deeper into both its own conventions and the abstract idiom of its music – something I’ve only seen Morris and Balanchine manage consistently before.

Balanchine, of course, gave us “modern ballet,” with the romantic nineteenth century as its frame; Wheeldon gives us much the same sense of exploration informed by tradition, only now the tradition is modernism itself (don’t worry, the romance is still there, too, subsumed in all the angular body sculpture). The music (largely drawn from Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata, and played with controlled maturity by Freda Locker) is ascetic, in fact almost cruelly reduced, but still defiantly lyric, a good match for an extension of Mr. B’s method. And if Wheeldon’s tropes are indebted to the master’s - Balanchine’s structure is there, along with his leotards – the piece still exudes a contorted, transformative power that strikes me as new, and Wheeldon’s own.

The dancers did well by the steps, even if at times the coordinated arcs (Wheeldon has a way of slipping dancers through each other, in echo of Ligeti’s taut melodic lines) weren’t yet quite as smooth as they should be. There was also a joyful duet for two men, exuberantly essayed by Roman Rykine and John Lam (the often-overlooked Mr. Lam was also notable in Brake the Eyes), and a somberly absorbing pas for Karine Seneca and Carlos Molina, set to the chilling little tune that Kubrick chose as his “fear theme” in Eyes Wide Shut.

After all this virtuosity, how did the reprise of Val Caniparoli’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion hold up? Well, dazzlingly, to be sure – but perhaps superficially dazzling, at least compared to what had come before. Caniparoli’s electric shifts between tango-like duets and a muscular, chaotic ensemble still enthralled, and the company, refreshed by the expert Romi Beppu and Nelson Madrigal, was certainly committed to them. But the second-movement pas, despite a subtle, attentive rendering by Lorna Feijóo and Yury Yanowsky, seemed to lack deeper resonance, and the livelier final movement didn’t quite make up for lost ground. Nevertheless, the musical performance, under Jonathan McPhee’s lively baton, was, as always, rewardingly precise, and there were fierce turns from Boyko Dossev and Joel Prouty. As the curtain came down, the house came down, too – and you left the evening, as Emily Dickinson might say, with the feeling that the top of your head had just been taken off. Few today think of ballet as intellectually challenging – but it is, and this memorable program is proof.